10 Things You Need To Know Before The Opening Bell

REUTERS/Regis DuvignauBritain’s Josh Collins riding Spook a Little competes in the team reining competition and first individual qualifying at the World Equestrian Games at the d’Ornano stadium in Caen on Monday.

2) Onward And Upward With The Stock Market. With the S&P 500 hitting a new all-time high, many are wondering how much higher stocks can go. According to Bloomberg interviews with fund managers, they can yet travel further. “We’re on the expensive side of fair value, but certainly not in the bubble place they were in the 2000 period or in a place that concerns us,” Ed Hyland, an Atlanta-based global investment specialist at JPMorgan Chase Private Bank, told Bloomberg’s Lu Wang and Oliver Renick. “There is potential for the market to go higher.” The “market is being rational, responding to improving domestic economic news, extraordinarily low interest rates, easy monetary policy, and limited inflation,” added Howard Ward, chief investment officer for growth equities at Rye, New York-based Gamco Investors Inc. “The market’s valuation level is very defensible.”

3) Amazon Buys Video Streaming Site For $US970 Million. The site, Twitch, allows people to upload footage of themselves playing video games while sometimes providing audio commentary over the footage. In some cases, people host video-game podcasts and shows. The site is also where many e-sports competitions are broadcast live. Twitch accounted for more than 40% of live-streaming traffic by volume in the U.S., according to online video analytics site Qwilt. That made it the No. 1 live-streaming platform by a large margin.

4) A Big Day For The Economy. At 8:30 a.m. we get durable goods orders for July. Consensus is for an increase of 5.1%. The headline number could be huge, however, because of the historically large number of aircraft orders in July. Then at 10 a.m. we get the Conference Board’s consumer confidence index for August. The consensus is for the index to decrease to 89.7 from 90.9. Also at 10 a.m., the Richmond Fed publishes its manufacturing survey for August.

5) Home Price Indexes. Two on Tuesday, which both hit at 9 a.m. One is the S&P/Case-Shiller House Price Index for June. Although this is the June report, it is really a three-month average of April, May, and June, Bill McBride notes. The consensus is for an 8.4% year-over-year increase in the Composite 20 index (NSA) for June. We also get the FHFA House Price Index for June. Consensus is for a 0.3% increase.

6) European Banks Offloading Assets. Pressured by regulations and the need to boost margins, Europe’s megabanks are looking to spin off noncore assets, something Bloomberg says could be a boon for the region’s economy. “Stronger banks will be good for credit in Europe,” Paul Tucker, a former deputy governor of the Bank of England, told Bloomberg’s Nicholas Comfort. “Weak banks don’t lend.”

7) No More Doughnuts For Kurdish Crude. A federal district judge in Texas threw out an order to seize one million barrels of Kurdish crude from a tanker that, for a short time, was doing “doughnuts” in the Gulf of Mexico, following protests from the Iraqi government that the shipment was illegal. However, it’s not guaranteed that the shipment will now be delivered, as Baghdad could yet attempt another challenge. Meanwhile the other tanker carrying Kurdish crude to the states challenged by Baghdad is returning to Cyprus.

8) Best Buy Is Sliding. The big-box retailer announced same-store sales were down 2.7% year-over-year, worse than the decline of 2.2% forecast by analysts. Shares were down more than 5% pre-market.

9) U.S. War On ISIS Expanding. President Barack Obama has authorised U.S. surveillance flights over Syria in preparation for air assaults against ISIS. BI’s Michael Kelley says this means the U.S. war against the Islamic militant group is about to grow. “Administration officials told The Guardian that the favoured long-term strategy to defeat ISIS is to train moderate Syrian rebels to fight both ISIS and the regime. But the non-jihadist rebels in the Free Syrian Army are now being decimated by both jihadists and the regime after years of being brushed aside as ‘former doctors, farmers, pharmacists, and so forth’ by Obama.”

10) Markets. Asian indexes were mostly lower. The Nikkei was down 0.6%, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was off 0.4%. In Europe, shares were mostly higher. London’s FTSE was up 0.3%, while France’s CAC climbed 0.4%. Germany’s DAX was flat. Dow futures were up 19 points.